Friday, July 17, 2009

Hall selected as new director of UIS MBA program

The University of Illinois at Springfield’s College of Business and Management has announced that Dr. James Hall has been selected as the new director of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program.

Hall, an associate professor in the department of Management Information Systems, succeeds Dr. Paul McDevitt, who is retiring this month.

“James will continue to build on the careful foundation laid by Paul McDevitt,” noted Dr. RonMcNeil, dean of the College of Business and Management at UIS. “Our vision is to increase the quality of the program even more, with both academic rigor and relevance that attracts more qualified students in our region and beyond.”

Hall earned his MBA from UIS in 1983 and his doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the MIS department at UIS in 2000. Hall has extensive private and public sector experience in business, transportation management and information systems applications.

The MBA degree at UIS is an AACSB accredited professional graduate program for individuals who aspire to hold positions of significant managerial and leadership responsibilities in organizations. In addition to core business subjects, the curriculum emphasizes strong conceptual thinking, disciplined decision-making and essential management and leadership skills.The UIS MBA program is offered in Springfield and at the UIS Peoria Center.

“I am honored to be selected as the MBA Program Director, especially given this stage in UIS MBA program development,” Hall said. “I plan to work with our faculty to build on our international AACSB accreditation to achieve an even higher quality MBA program to meet the needs of students and organizations in the Springfield and Peoria regions and beyond.”

As an alumna of UIS who now resides and works in the Chicago land area, it will be interesting to see if this MBA program expands by offering an online program or even a satelite campus in Chicago. Although I understand the reluctance to extend an MBA program which is geared toward in class networking to an online setting, having worked for a top MBA school in Chicago I can honestly say this is an avenue that is relatively untouched. My undergraduate studies at UIS prove that administration and faculty are doing an excellent job with their program and if combined with UIS's technological and online learning capabilities, I believe you would have a program that is highly successful!